Recent years have seen significant growth in the variety and availability of audio, video, and multimedia content. The proliferation of internet sites and the introduction of new media platforms including cellphones, personal data assistants, and other portable media players, have led to an increased demand for content delivery in a variety of different formats. Likewise, the rapid growth in user-generated content has created a large supply of media content available to users in a large number of disparate formats.
Converting content from a source format provided by a content source to a different target format supported by a particular media player can be time-consuming and computationally-intense. Moreover, the wide variety of source and target formats available can result in slow content-delivery, create congestion in content-processing components, and require ever increasing storage capabilities.